Tiananmen: Little-known facts about 1989 China crisis

Toward the end of May in 1989, it was easy to think that China was headed toward revolution. News broadcasts across the world beamed images of ever-larger marches and protests to demand change to the communist regime (though the movement had its share of contradictions, such as university students carrying around a statue dedicated to democracy while singing the Marxist anthem “The Internationale”). With glasnost and perestroika reforms in full swing in the U.S.S.R., the time seemed ripe for change in China, too.

But all this came to an end with a military crackdown in the early hours of June 4, and the final death toll from that night remains unknown. Unlike the reaction to demonstrations against a Soviet coup two years later, when Russian soldiers refused to fire on protesters, the Chinese People’s Liberation Army proved willing to use deadly force to protect the government.

Now, 25 years later, several of the key details of Tiananmen have been forgotten, even if memory of the event itself lives on. Here then, are some lesser-known facts about what happened. (Pictured: a massive candlelight vigil in Hong Kong in 2009 to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square crackdown.)

What do you mean ‘Tiananmen’?

If you ask the average Chinese citizen what they think about Tiananmen, they might respond that they think it’s over on Chang-An Avenue. For China, Tiananmen Square was an iconic Beijing landmark long before the events of June 1989, so the name Tiananmen — usually translated as “Gates of Heavenly Peace” — doesn’t have any special connection to the 1989 attack on protesters there. Instead, Chinese refer to what happened as the “6-4 Incident,” for the date June 4. Actually, many key events in Chinese history get the date-number treatment: There’s the 9-18 Incident (when Japan invaded China on Sept. 18, 1931), the 5-4 Movement (a mass protest on May 4, 1919, that led to the modernization of China), and so on.

From BBC archival footage

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Tank Man’s passive and active resistance

“Tank Man” — a still-unidentified citizen who stood in front of a column of tanks the day after the crackdown to block them from moving — has become the symbol of the Tiananmen events, at least for the West. In fact, the picture of Tank Man standing at attention in the middle of the street is so set in our minds that we often forget Tank Man didn’t just stand there forever but also climbed onto the lead tank and began cursing at its commander. Meanwhile, in China, Tank Man is more or less unknown: Really only those who’ve traveled a lot would recognize the image, given the success of Chinese government censors in keeping such pictures from public view. When the Canadian acrobatics troupe Cirque du Soleli briefly displayed a photo of Tank Man during a performance in Beijing last year, CNN reported an audible gasp from the audience — but it’s likely that the gaspers were Westerners and wealthy Beijingers who’d been abroad, since most Chinese would not have gotten the reference.

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What does China remember?

If Tank Man isn’t the symbol of June 4 in China, then who or what is? Possibly, it’s this image of student protest leader Wu’er Kaixi, wearing pajamas and angrily lecturing Chinese Premier Li Peng. As part of an effort to defuse the situation, Li had agreed to meet with Wu’er Kaixi and fellow democracy-movement organizer Wang Dan in an exchange that was broadcast nationwide on state television. It clearly didn’t go as Li had planned, and the event is said to have made up Li’s mind to crack down on the demonstrators.

It certainly shocked the public. The Cultural Revolution (when China was run much the way North Korea is today) was a very recent memory, and here were a couple of college kids wagging their fingers at the premier of China himself! In the picture here, Li looks uncomfortable, at left, while Wu’er Kaixi speaks — he had just been released from the hospital (hence the pajamas) after passing out at Tiananmen Square while on a hunger strike with other students.

Courtesy Everett Collection

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Hu and Gorbachev were key factors

The whole democracy movement actually began as a student demonstration to mourn the April 15 death of Hu Yaobang, a former general secretary of the Communist Party who had been ousted after taking a soft line on some reformist student protests three years earlier. The pro-Hu gathering grew in size, but it was still pretty modest until an editorial in the People’s Daily describing the protesters as traitors resulted in a massive march that included many regular citizens as well as students. Another turning point came in mid-May, when Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev (pictured here) arrived in Beijing for what was seen as a crucial visit in repairing relations between the two countries. Many of the Western journalists who had arrived to cover the Gorbachev trip witnessed the protest movement gathering steam and ended up staying to cover it — and the subsequent crackdown — making it much harder for officials to sweep events under the rug.

Bloomberg News

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The aftermath: Into the army

In the days following the crackdown, the mood in Beijing remained tense. Anonymous supporters of the protests began hanging photographs on lampposts of those killed, along with the occasional bloodied item of clothing, but it soon became apparent that the democracy movement was over. A large number of arrests were made following June 4, though no definitive information is available on exactly how many. Meanwhile, in order to head off any further trouble from protest-prone students, the government ordered that all incoming students at Peking University (the center of the Tiananmen democracy movement) and the similarly prestigious Fudan University in Shanghai spend a full year in military training before entering college. According to reports from those who underwent the training, it was heavy on ideological instruction and effectively isolated the new students from those already at universities. The “extra year” in the army continued for several successive freshmen classes before it was abolished in favor of the current system, which requires that all teenagers do a few weeks of training before entering high school.

Sam Yeh -AFP/Getty Images

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Where are they now?

Of the top three leaders of the student protesters, only Wang Dan ended up in prison. He served four years (there are conflicting theories about why the sentence was relatively light — it may have been related to Beijing’s bid to host the Olympics), and then left the Chinese mainland to become a university professor and activist. As for the other two — Chai Ling and Wu’er Kaixi — they were both smuggled out of the country and ended up with tech start-ups. Chai fled the country some months after the crackdown, and, after earning a business degree at Harvard University, she founded educational-software firm Jenzabar. Wu’er Kaixi (pictured here) also spent some time at Harvard and worked at a dot-com before emigrating to Taiwan, where he became a talk-radio host. Over the past several years, Wu’er Kaixi — desperate to see his family again — has tried to surrender to Chinese authorities, but he has been repeatedly refused entry into the country. As for Premier Li Peng, he remained a powerful figure within the party (at least until recently, according to some reports — he’s currently 85 years old). But if he were ever considered as a possible successor to Deng Xiaoping, China’s leader at the time, that seems to have ended after June 4. Instead, the Shanghai party boss, Jiang Zemin, was promoted after having managed to keep Shanghai from erupting in the sort of mass protests seen in Beijing, and when Deng died in 1997, Jiang — already serving as president — took the reins of power. Meanwhile, Li’s name remains inextricably linked with the deadly military response of 25 years ago.

— Michael Kitchen

Sam Yeh -AFP/Getty Images

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Where are they now?

Of the top three leaders of the student protesters, only Wang Dan ended up in prison. He served four years (there are conflicting theories about why the sentence was relatively light — it may have been related to Beijing’s bid to host the Olympics), and then left the Chinese mainland to become a university professor and activist. As for the other two — Chai Ling and Wu’er Kaixi — they were both smuggled out of the country and ended up with tech start-ups. Chai fled the country some months after the crackdown, and, after earning a business degree at Harvard University, she founded educational-software firm Jenzabar. Wu’er Kaixi (pictured here) also spent some time at Harvard and worked at a dot-com before emigrating to Taiwan, where he became a talk-radio host. Over the past several years, Wu’er Kaixi — desperate to see his family again — has tried to surrender to Chinese authorities, but he has been repeatedly refused entry into the country. As for Premier Li Peng, he remained a powerful figure within the party (at least until recently, according to some reports — he’s currently 85 years old). But if he were ever considered as a possible successor to Deng Xiaoping, China’s leader at the time, that seems to have ended after June 4. Instead, the Shanghai party boss, Jiang Zemin, was promoted after having managed to keep Shanghai from erupting in the sort of mass protests seen in Beijing, and when Deng died in 1997, Jiang — already serving as president — took the reins of power. Meanwhile, Li’s name remains inextricably linked with the deadly military response of 25 years ago.

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